Well after following Slowlemon's thread in the Folding section on here with his Sandybridge Xeon build and seeing the brilliant performance for the wattage drawn I decided to build one myself taking bit of a risk with a pair of Intel E5 2660 Xeons from a company on eBay from Hong Kong! The seller has great rep and offers DOA and 60-day warranties so it was bit of a risk but luckily is paid off and the Xeons finally arrived last week!

After some chat with people on my thread in the folding section I decided to go for an Asus Z9PE-D8 WS motherboard, I already had a spare 900w Coolermaster PSU with dual 8-pin CPU connectors and is 80+ Silver also I already had some spare 2GB RAM modules from a previous build and 2 x Titan Fenrir coolers left over from my previous x58 s1366 builds but unfortunately there is no socket mounting kit available for the Titans for s2011 so will have to see what I can come up with!

Pictures to come below as the project starts to take shape, I will be doing a lot of folding on this but I am also thinking about using it as a VMware host with a nice big RAID array hmmmm.... The case is going to be the pain as its an EEB form factor, I don't want to just buy a case at this stage so going to see what I can do with a few spare cases I have and get the old on it!

[EDIT 09.10.12] - I am now making this a dual build thread where I will be building a new home NAS as well as its about time I got a proper RAID set up going on at home!

[EDIT 24.10.12] - Nas now built and running, just configuring the RAID for the best I/O, see post #8

[EDIT 08.11.12] - Now stuck into building the new server rack/cabinet for my home office

[EDIT 13.11.12] - Cabinet now built and kit installed to see how its all looks and runs see post #21

Home NAS will consist of:

A 4U Rack mount case

Low power motherboard (TBC)

Low power dual core CPU (TBC)

Only need 2 - 4GB RAM

Looking at a Seasonic G series 360w '80 Plus Gold' PSU

Hardware RAID card, looking at a 8-port LSi 2960i at the moment

4 x Western Digital 3TB "Red" (Raid edition) Harddrives

60GB SSD for boot and OS drive

Not sure on OS yet, either Windows or FreeNAS

Plenty more to come including a custom built dual 8u rack made from MDF to hold all my server and network gear

Right, some pics from today! Its now up and running and I managed to find some M4 bolts that were the right length with a washer to fit the Titan mounting plates safely to the Socket 2011 mounting points although I did have to take the to one of the plates as it hit the heatsink

Hi cooler could you let me know where you managed to get a motherboard from as they seem out of stock everywhere.

I got it from Pixmania in the end mate as that was the only place I could find stock, I have been told Overclockers.co.uk can get them so will be worth giving them a call but saying all that I seen this a bit late so you have prob already got one by now!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Editor22

Very nice dude!

Cheers bud

Quote:

Originally Posted by maestro0428

That will make a very nice folding machine indeed. Ill be watching.

It is a bit of a folding monster, with Ubuntu 12.04 and the Kraken installed im seeing 170,000+ PPD on the bigadv projects

Right then, not touched the EP Xeon build for the last few weeks, it is sat in the corner folding for the moment as I wanted to get my new NAS set up and working first before I carry on with the EP Xeon build.

Would like to take the opportunity to say a massive thanks to Andy from Overclockers UK for sorting me out some discount on 4 x 3TB Western Digital Red drives and a Seasonic 80+ Gold PSU, many thanks mate

OK so I have now put together the new NAS and currently configuring it and playing with the RAID settings, going to go for a Raid-5 configuration so will be getting 8.18TB of usable space from the 4 x 3TB Red's Going to stick with default 64KB stripe size and have a play with the read-ahead, read through, write through and write back settings to see what I/O I can get, will report back soon

Spec of the NAS is:

4U Rack mount case

MSI H77MA-G43 s1155 Motherboard

Intel i3 2120 CPU @ stock 3.3ghz

Kingston Hyper DDR3 RAM 4 x 4gb @ stock 1600mhz

Seasonic G series 360w '80 Plus Gold' PSU

LSi 8-port 2960i RAID Controller with 256mb Cache (Need a BBU!)

4 x Western Digital 3TB "Red" (Raid edition) Harddrives

Icy Box IB-545SSK Tray less 5 Bay HDD enclosure

Crucial M4 60GB SSD for OS & Plex server

WD Green 2TB HDD for general dumping group/PC backups/DL's etc

Intel Pro 1000 PT PCIe Server NIC

There is a 120mm inlet fan at low speed, the top panel expansion card arm holder jobber I've modded to hold an 80mm fan to breeze air over the RAID controller heatsink as that sucker gets hot!

Below are some pics of progress, the 12u cabinet in the background is not deep enough to hold the 2 x 4U rackmount cases I have (other 4U is my VMware ESXi 5.1 server) so I will be selling this 12u cabinet off and building my own using MDF and 4 sets of 8U brackets, more to come on that later on!.....

I have 1 problem though and that is I don't have a BBU (Battery Backup Unit) installed which means that having the Write Policy set to 'Always Write Back' is dangerous because if there is a power failure then it will most likely cause data corruption and mess up the array and give me a massive headache!

I currently have set the Write Policy set to 'Write Through' which will get rid of the risk but it has dropped my write speeds to less than a quarter of what they are above, mad how much difference it makes! The BBU is about £140 so I will be getting one next month I think as I can't deal with 40-50MB/s write speeds!

Started building the new twin 8u rack this weekend to replace the old metal 12u rack, one side will house the 2 x 4u NAS and VMware servers and the the other side will be for the networking equipment etc, here are some progress pics.

Still need to spend some time on the EP-Xeon build but this needs to be finished first

Not had much chance this week to work on the cabinet but I have mocked up the 8u rails, had to use the router to shave 5mm of each side of the central 18mm MDF section to get both rails in tighter to allow enough space either side for the rack mount equipment.

There are some holes in the back to allow cables to be passed between the 2 compartments when the back is on and also im playing with a vent to put in the top back to allow the exhaust fans from the servers to push out the warm air, might invert it so it looks a bit neater, also might paint the vent but before I do anything I need to jigsaw out the hole haha

This looks proper nice so far mate, loving the speed of those drives! Glad I could help you out

Have you got the write issues sorted yet?

Thanks mate, appreciate the help with the drives a lot, just really hope they are long term reliable as having to rebuild the array could take a good 48hrs +

Still need to get a BBU so I can turn "Write Back" back on and get the write speeds nice and high again but to be honest as data is mostly read from the NAS then I haven't 'really' been too impacted by the lower write speeds

Last night I went for a trial fitment of everything and its all good, pics to come shortly